Neighbors

The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

De: Jan T. Gross

Narrado por: Rory Barnett

One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town's Jews. Neighbors tells their story.

This is a shocking, brutal story that has never before been told. It is the most important study of Polish-Jewish relations to be published in decades and should become a classic of Holocaust literature. Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts and other evidence into an engulfing reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but forgotten by history. His investigation reads like a detective story, and its unfolding yields wider truths about Jewish-Polish relations, the Holocaust, and human responses to occupation and totalitarianism. It is a story of surprises: The newly occupying German army did not compel the massacre, and Jedwabne's Jews and Christians had previously enjoyed cordial relations.

After the war, the nearby family who saved Jedwabne's surviving Jews was derided and driven from the area. The single Jew offered mercy by the town declined it. Most arresting is the sinking realization that Jedwabne's Jews were clubbed, drowned, gutted, and burned, not by faceless Nazis but by people whose features and names they knew well: their former schoolmates and those who sold them food, bought their milk, and chatted with them in the street.

As much as such a question can ever be answered, Neighbors tells us why. In many ways, this is a simple audiobook. It is easy to listen to in a single sitting, and hard not to. But its simplicity is deceptive. Gross's new and persuasive answers to vexed questions rewrite the history of 20th-century Poland. This audiobook proves, finally, that the fates of Poles and Jews during World War II can be comprehended only together.

©2001 Princeton University Press (P)2018 Tantor

A perfect historical analysis

This book is so meticulously researched and presented with such precise intention. Gross analyzes the evidence and organizes his arguments with clarity and purpose, in order to drive his conclusions home.

wrong narrator for a very important book.

I read this book years ago. The history has sent me on a long road to reading and listening to every biography I can about lives from WW2.

Jewish holocaust pre WWII

In depth study of pre World War II murderous prejudice against jewish people, in the hands of people who knew them and coexisted peacefully with them

Courageous account of what really happened.

Neighbors is a courageous telling of the truth of what happened to many polish Jews during WWII. Killed not by nazis or the German army but by their own neighbors. This story is well known to the few victims who survived the murders, but rarely told. Shamefully, Poland still refuses to admit to the less than heroic tale of their own nations part as Hitler’s willing executioners.

Academic

If you're expecting a diarists account or first hand recollection you'll be disappointed. This a historiography.